Hypothesis is a tool that allows for social annotation, the ability for students to annotate an electronic document as they read, and for those annotations to be available to their classmates for comment. This is a way to bring the long-standing practice of writing in the margins to electronic texts in a way that is reasonably easy to use and adds a level of collaboration by allowing others to see and comment on what
you write. Hypothesis allows for any webpage or OCR document to be annotated, and so it makes this function available to almost any text. Annotations can include text highlights as well as comments.
Why is this useful?
Social annotation is useful for helping students understand your course material, improving their reading skills generally, and building community among your students. Especially in an online course, where it is important to be more deliberate about community-building strategies, social annotation can be a meaningful addition to your class and give students an additional way to connect around the course
material.
Adding annotations to an electronic document encourages students to read closely and stay engaged with the material. Students appear to spend more time with the material when they are required to make annotations and may read the article multiple times, annotating as they go back through it. As students ask and answer each other’s questions, they build a resource for understanding the text. Students use the annotated document as a reference, looking through comments to see if their questions have been answered, and answering questions themselves.
Social annotation systems like Hypothesis can also help build a sense of community in your course, with both text-directed and peer-directed comments often added to a document and may be better suited to replicating in-person interaction rather than an LMS discussion forum.